A Look At Codemasters' GRID

I’m a huge fan of Sports/GT-Racing genre of games. Recently Codemasters had released their newest game, GRID, and I’d downloaded the demo version of GRID couple of days ago and decided to check it out.

And yes the visual presentation just blew me away! Everything looks gorgeous, from the menu screens which are alive in 3D, to the loading screens which, instead of the usual flat progress bar, show your accomplishments in your career.

The demo weighs in at about 915MB, and has 3 types of races, a Ford Mustang GT-R on the streets of San Francisco in the eBay Motors Muscle Cup, a drift race in a Nissan S15 Silvia in the Advan Drift Trophy at Yokohama Docks, and a standard circuit-type race in a BMW 320si touring cars.

I’d played GRID on my Dell Inspiron 1520(Core2Duo T5250, 1.5GHz, 2GB RAM, nvidia 8600m GT) at 1280×800, 2X MSAA and details weren’t changed, autodetected by Grid and as you can see from the screenshots, the game looks phenomenal. Framerate was about 25-30fps, and despite running at just 2X AA, there was hardly any signs of jaggies.

The handling of the cars overall using keyboard was very difficult. On straights, its fine, on curves and it becomes very difficult, and once you lose control, well you’re gone. The damage modelling is fantastically done, and its not just cosmetic either – you can really feel the car getting more and more difficult to handle.

Its been a while since I’ve enjoyed a decent racing game – might as well pick up GRID, and along with it, an XBOX 360 controller as well!

Asked a friend to download it for me. It seems even the full version is out weighing in at ~8gigs! I've lost my interest in gaming, but that sure does look cool!
@Joel: Dude, it won't even work on your antique P4 with integrated graphics!